


Call Me

by somekindofseizure



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Breakup Fic, F/M, Ficlets, prompts, revival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-20
Updated: 2016-10-20
Packaged: 2018-08-23 15:29:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8332873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somekindofseizure/pseuds/somekindofseizure





	

******

She pulls the muscle in her back around 9 pm, two glasses of Malbec and probably forty-five clammy handshakes in.  She is so tired of lipstick-stained, wet-circled cocktail napkins that she’s almost grateful for the excuse to leave.  When it’s over and done with, there’ll be money for a new maternity wing, a robot that removes gall bladders noninvasively, but for now it just feels like a room full of rich people patting themselves on the back. Something, she thinks with a wince, she will not physically be able to do for at least three days.

It happens doing something stupid – turning to catch a waiter and place an empty glass on his tray.  She’d been mid-conversation with some guy in a green tie, his head up his ass and his eyes in the deep velvet neckline of her dress.  Her play for the waiter was a desperate one, a last minute plan she hatched in hopes he’d lead her politely from party purgatory to the land of milk and canapés.  But the gods of mingling took no such mercy upon her and she instead found herself gasping and grabbing the waiter’s crisp white-shirted arm while a freshly wound clothespin pinched two of her vertebrae together.  Her empty glass toppled on the rubber tray while the waiter asked if she was all right.  Green Tie disappeared.  Apparently she was less sexy while cursing under her breath.

Twenty minutes and many very shallow breaths later, she stands in windowed darkness in her bedroom, light switches sulking from nightly neglect.  She is doing fine; she gets up, goes to work, has too much energy to call herself depressed.  But at night, she is reminded there is no reason to see what she looks like naked. Without Mulder, her bedroom is nothing more than a station stopover, a dark commuter tunnel between one day and the next.  She steps out of her shoes and begins to reach for the zipper between her shoulders.

“Fuck.”

She’ll get it off later.  She goes to the narrow vertical cabinet in the kitchen where she’d stood on a chair the day she moved in, carefully lining up cold medicines, vitamins, thermometers. She’d drawn a breath of relief as she realized her things would no longer have to mingle with Mulder’s mess of sleep aids and antidepressants, a memory that now embarrasses her.  The muscle relaxants are deep on the back of the third shelf if she remembers correctly.  Even with a chair, she won’t be able to get them.

He says he’ll come over right away.  She gingerly puts a robe over her dress, sits at the table like a tenuously balanced pile of rocks.  She contemplates whether this favor is appropriate, whether it’s unfair to ask him to do things like this.  But he’d once told her to call him if she needed help, if there was heavy furniture to move in.  She’d told him it was a furnished place and watched the tension ease in his eyebrows, like drapes letting some sliver of hope in.

When he arrives, his shoulders are back and his eyes bright, face freshly-shaven.  He’s wearing her favorite t-shirt, the one with a tiny hole above the pocket where she petted and tore at him so constantly that the material thinned.  She leads him into the kitchen, offers him something to drink while he reaches into the cabinet for the pills she needs, cheerfully asking her how she did it.

“You wouldn’t believe it.”

“Scully, I believe anything, you know that.”

“Putting a wine glass down.”

“I don’t get a pour?”

“No, not here.  I was out.”  She sighs and looks off to the side as she pictures herself sleeping in the dress, her knees locked together at the hem.  If she’s not better in the morning, she could wind up having to wear it into surgery under a white coat.  “Actually, there’s something else you can help me with.”

She can’t make any of the natural shapes needed to take a robe off like a normal person, so she showily drops it to the crooks of her elbows, then flips it back onto the chair behind her.  His mouth opens, and his eyes roam, but the rest of him seems frozen in time.

“Oh…” he says quietly and she realizes he might think she’s seducing him.  It is only now that she’s standing here in front of him like this that she realizes how good this dress looks on her.  No amount of mirrors or bedroom light switches could have given her that.

“I can’t get to the zipper.”

“Oh,” he says sounding more like himself, if a little curt.

She turns and his approach is grave and rhythmic, the walk of an aisle they’ve never been down together. She half expects him to genuflect when he gets to her body, half expects him to palm her neck and tug it to the side, make room for a fully bloomed kiss the way he used to do when he tore through the house calling her name and found her doing the dishes, or laundry, or any task he didn’t find important enough to share her with.

But instead, it’s just the slightest rise of temperature in the middle of her back, and she knows his hands are wavering, preparing themselves for the thickness and texture of the soft black material.  She jumps when she feels the flat of his fingernail against her skin under the dress.

That’s right, there’s a hook-and-eye there above the zipper.  She remembers when she had to tell him these things, when she’d wonder how he’d gotten into his thirties without ever having to get a woman out of her dress.  What kind of girlfriends had he had?  How superior to them, how generous she’d felt then.  How much more she loved him.  How small she feels now with him hovering, strong and cedary over her shoulder, his bed twenty miles away.  

He takes the zipper in hand and it sticks, the stretchy material clinging to her with the stubbornness she’d once wanted from him.  He expertly places one hand on her waist to hold it steady as he urges the zipper down her back, drawing her skin out like maple syrup from a tree.  The hand running the length between her ribs and hips lingers only a moment before he backs away.

“I can’t do this,” he says. “I can’t come and undress you at the end of a night when you’ve been out with… whoever…”

“I wasn’t on a date, Mulder. It was a work event.”

“Still.”  Her shame and anger blend and go sour as they bring her lips into a pouted purse.

“’Anything, just call me.’ That’s what you said.”

“I know.  I’m taking it back.”  

The twinge in her chest finds the pain in her back and she feels their gears groove together, forming a lock around her ribs.  She fears she might cry, but she can’t, she doesn’t even have enough breath for it. He walks toward the door, shuffling his acceptance of the status quo, withholding the warm reassurance of a storming-out.  She follows, balls of her feet shoe-sore as they push against the hardwood floor, pad across the rug someone else picked out.

“Mulder.”

“Call me when you decide you miss me, you need me and you fucking hate this.  Okay, Scully?”

She stands staring at the door, her dress gaping behind her like a life-threatening wound.  She looks down when he’s gone, touches her waist, as if to try to find the warm print of his hand, the heat of his stare down the front of her dress.  And suddenly, she feels a deep breath break free and run a natural course.  Is the medicine working, or did Mulder loosen her with his warm grip, run her under the tap of his love and loyalty?  She picks up the phone once again.  He’s silent when he answers.  She holds her breath while he takes three long ones.

“I have to hang up so I can cancel my car,” he says finally.

She lets the dress fall to the floor, waiting with the lights on for the buzzer to ring.


End file.
